Alt Wire is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Broken Pencil editor Lindsay Gibb.
I started making zines when I was 15 and I stapled my last page when I was 21. A short run by comparison to other zine-makers who, when one zine is played out, start up a new title, and who foresee no end to the zine as their means of creative output. And while I read new zines on a daily basis, I recently when stumbled upon Teri Vlassopoulos’s blog and was brought back to the days when I used to make my own. Vlassopoulos was the creator of Melt the Snow. It was one of my favorite zines in the ‘90s, and she uses her blog to talk about zine history, Canadian lit mags and books she’s recently dug into. She also writes about zinemaking in Shameless magazine’s new anthology She’s Shameless which is due out at the end of June.
When I’m not reading or writing about zines I’m usually knitting. I’m relatively new to knitting—only 5 years in the game—but the obsession swelled quickly in me. Some of the best social networking sites I’ve found for knitters include Ravelry—where you can share patterns, organize your projects using the sites cataloguing tools and show your latest creations to other users and Men Who Knit—where male knitters can create profiles and blog about their projects. Church of Craft is, of course, a great example of a way to not only connect knitters and other crafters online, but also to lure them off the web and into workshops, craft retreats and stitch and bitch nights in various cities. And whether you care about knitting or not, Thread Banger's recent "DIY Roundup" of the funniest knitting patterns on the net is definitely worth a look.
Since I write about documentary filmmaking on the side, and I’m a David Lynch fan, those two things combined have me interested in Lynch’s Interview Project, in which takes a trip across America to meet regular folks and talk to them about their lives. As Lynch says “it’s something that’s human and you can’t stay away from it.”
I wanted to give an honorable mention to the sites I frequent when I really don’t want to be productive for a half hour: Fuck You Penguin, CakeWrecks and Totally Looks Like.
Bio: Lindsay Gibb is the editor of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts. She is based in Toronto where she is also a staff writer for Realscreen, a trade magazine for documentary filmmakers, and an associate editor and co-founder of Spacing magazine, which examines Toronto’s urban landscape. Watch for Can’tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil, to be published by ECW Press in Fall 2009.